Sacked

Shortly after my ten-year anniversary with Adobe Systems I got booted in a RIF that wiped out some 680 employees. As I posted on my Facebook profile:

I was supposed to get laid off in LAST December’s Adobe bloodbath, but my director cadged a stay of execution that bought me another year. During which I developed some really interesting new skills. Cashing out PTO/sabbatical won’t suck. While it’s not a great severance package, it IS a severance package. I get to say I’m technically still an Adobe employee for a couple more months which will help me refinance my home. While I’ll have to pay for my healthcare, at least I don’t have to shop for it and hope I can get it at ALL. My compatriots on the Premiere team (now and previously) have all offered all kinds of support, as have many others, and it may help me get a new job. The bill to extend unemployment benefits passed. I hadn’t finished what I wanted to do in October, now I’ll have time for that. My wife’s Web sites need some attention, now I’ll have time for that too.

And I can make sure the house is in shape for our first goddamn party since we moved in here!

So it’s Day 1 of my pseudoemployment (technically I’m employed for two more months but cut off from Adobe resources — vpn, email, network etc.). I woke up thinking “What should I do today?” I have lots of traditional options:

Resume drinking

Watch an entire season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Masturbate

Go see a movie

Sleep

Start finding a job

I opted for a combination of the last two. It took a while to find my resumé on ten years of accumulated hard drives, but I did it and now I’m faced with summarizing a decade of being kind of technologically all over the place. I hate my resume format but it’s compatible with distribution as .doc, .pdf and .html which seems valuable. I dunno. Thoughts? Anyway, I also spent a ton of time updating LinkedIn and Facebook, of course, and trying to remove references to my Adobe email from important sites like banks and PayPal (since my email is now pretty much routed to dev/null — it doesn’t bounce but I don’t get it either). I slept more than I should, and spent a lot of time talking with well-wishers. But in general I think I really need to apply a work ethic to unemployment. We’re at, what, 12% around here?